Hero For A Day - A Rousing Success!

Hello!

This weekend just gone I attended a 24 hour charity gaming event in support of the Children's Cancer and Leukaemia Group run by the gent that is Nick Thrower at The Burning Eye. There were 10 people in attendance in two team of five and boy did we have a blast!

Here is a picture of us at the start:

Right to left I am 4th with the arms raised

And about 2/3 of the way through:

Note the source of caffeine in my hand....

Sadly no picture of us at the end when we were truly spent! The total by the end of the night was somewhere around £1300 which I think is a good show for 10 sweaty guys in a parish hall pushing models around!!

Mike from St Andrews Wargaming will have some great battle reports coming up from his games which I was in one of so head over to check his blog out if you want to see how deranged we became in our tactics as the hours rolled on! Due to the start time of midnight on friday we all ended up being awake for nearly 48 hours!!!

You can still give to this good cause if you want by clicking on this link here :)

Peace out,

Rob

Blog Recommendations - The Burning Eye

Good day,

I've been very conscious recently of over selling myself and bombarding people with my hobby and review posts. I'd like to apologise if you are a bit sick of seeing me pop up all the time. I'm planning to curtail my posting a little bit as I feel i am getting under peoples skin. So with that in mind I thought what better way to fill your slightly freer time than by recommending you another blog!

Today I am going to run through why you should be reading The Burning Eye. This is a blog by my hobby comrade Nick Thrower who has been an excellent pillar of support in my painting and blog endeavours for several years now. I met blog whilst I was an active member of The Dark City, the premier Dark Eldar forum on the net. I don't post there anymore since I lost my Dark Eldar army and the blog takes up most of my online time these days. 

Nick was and is an excellent member of the forum, with great advice and always a good one liner to make you chuckle, his quotes populate many a members signature bar! But he as also been putting great effort into his blog for about 4 years now and is a steady hand at the helm. We also chat on social media and whatsapp and have traded magic cards and figure. This year I will be attending an event run by Nick (see last segment below) and I am looking forward to buying him a pint and a pie (as he lives near the heartland of great pies - Melton Mowbray). 

Enough waffle! Here are 5 reasons to visit Nick's blog :)

Terrain Tuesday

Nick has an excellent amount of terrain work on his blog. Something I am sorely lacking myself as I have little to no space to keep built terrain without it cluttering up my room further! The highlight of this aspect of The Burning Eye is Nick's ongoing modular terrain project. Below are a few pictures from his blog of individual pieces as well as pictures from his battle reports which show it in use! If you want to see more of Terrain Tuesday then click the link :)

How to Build an Army

This isn't about gluing things together, but a series of excellent articles written by Nick that really help in setting out a structure to find what you want from an army. Now this might seem obvious, but as many will know, the army you first jump because its pretty isn't what you actually enjoy playing OR the units you jump at for an army aren't what you enjoy playing. Similarly Nick gives excellent direction in how to build a cohesive force with a theme or background, something that can really boost your enjoyment of playing that army. 

Finally Nick touches on the tricky subject of actually building and painting your army. I would personally have found this section invaluable when I first got back into 40k 3-4 years ago as it really helps delineate all the aspects of this incredibly huge and ultimately important part of the hobby. If you are struggling for some structure or inspiration to your painting of a fresh (or even your first) army then this will help a lot. Linky link for all you curios ones :)

The Miniatures

Nick is more than a dab hand at painting, though I would hazard he is going to be humble about any praise. Nick has some beautiful beautiful miniatures in his collection. The pinnacle of these (thus far) are his Dark Eldar, there is some quite delicate and beautiful "scroll work" on the panels of his Dark Eldar raiders that just boggle my mind. I really couldn't fathom doing that on a single one let alone multiples! I will let the pictures do the talking here. Below are some Dark Eldar, Tau and his most recent addition the Dusk Knights, which will look stunning with their striking scheme once they are completed. No link, just head over to the blog and take a walk :)

Reviews

Nick has an excellent writing manner which confers a lot of information without being either bare bones (such as mine are) or laborious like others I have read. There is always a hint of the cheeky (and the cheesy) in his review, plus an excellent ability to view things within a wider context. I would thoroughly suggest you check out his Tau Unit Reviews as well as his ongoing review of the new Angels of Death Supplement. Though there are other dotted around his gaming realm and you should expect many more to come :)

Hero for a Day

Its difficult to overstate how pleasant a chap Nick is, he is a terribly nice and engaging member of any community he is part of and he has even been know to wear chicken hats... Not quite a patch on the fancy dress shenanigans of Mike from St Andrews Wargaming (Batman and Ghostbusters to name a couple), but it is the picture of Nick that jumps to my mind first! 

Something that really underscores this aspect of Nick is the event he is running this year that I shall be attending. It is called Hero for a Day and its a 24 hour 40k gaming marathon, but not just any simple "play 40k for a day" but a full on constructed Narrative campaign that pits two teams against each other. The work going into this is sublime, as for each battle either team could win which presents multiple different routes of narrative progression, for which Nick has written all possible endings despite known most won't be used!

The real key aspect of this event though is Nick's motivation for putting it on, The whole event is to raise awareness for the Childhood Cancer and Leukemia Group (CCLG) which does incredible work both in the care for children with cancer, but also care and information for the parents of children that are unlucky enough to suffer from cancer. Additionally the CCLG is also an active partner of academic research, providing data and funding to academia such that we can better treat the multiple types and sub-types of cancer that are out there. 

This event doesn't arise from nothing but a touching personal story regarding a friend of Nick and his young son George who is bravely battling cancer. I won't elaborate here as Nick has done so very well on his blog. Pleas follow this link to find out more about the event and the inspiration for it. 

You can also follow this link to the Virgin Just Giving Page if you wish to donate. It is for an excellent cause :)

That's all from myself and the Burning Eye today, as I said I will probably cool my posting for a while to allow people to find me interesting again ;). Remember, as always,

Peace out,

Rob

Hero For A Day - A Good cause worth giving too

Hi Readers,

Today I'm just going to talk about an event being run by Nick over at The Burning Eye (keep an eye out for a blog recommendation article for more specific info) which is a charitable 24 hour marathon 40k event. 

The Charity

The charity in question is The Childrens Cancer and Leukaemia Group (CCLG) which does excellent research into cancer treatment both by providing a point of interaction for multiple professionals within the academic non-profit sphere as well as the pharmaceutical industry sphere to collaborate on important developments, but also provides direct funding for research into cancer therapies as well as general research which deepens our understanding of the pathologies that underlie aberrant cell behaviour.

As well as the forward motion in science support that they provide, the CCLG also plays an incredibly important and informative role for parents who have had the crushing diagnosis of cancer for their loved child. 

If you want to find out the exact motivation for Nick choosing this charity then please head on over to his blog to read the entire background of this event. Suffice to say it is for an extremely good cause. 

The Event

Nick has been putting in a gargantuan amount of effort to create an excellent team based marathon event which pits two overall alignments of 'good' vs 'bad' (as I recall at the time of writing), with each team based victory altering the flow of the games to come and having direct impact on the unfolding plot. 

I won't go into more detail than that as Nick has some very excellent posts which chart his creative process and I don't think I can do justice to his extreme efforts!! 

The event is pretty space limited though with only 20 participant places available this inaugral year., So if you are interested may I recommend you register that interest with Nick post haste to guarantee a place :) I will absolutely be attending as I think it sounds like an incredibly fun day out to bond with some fellow hobby fanatics over a good cause. Much merriment and fun will be had of that I am sure, plus if you are (for some unknown reason) interested in meeting me than I will guarantee to stand you a pint :) (or a bottle of well crafted ale - no Fosters allowed amigos).

Sounds Great! But I can't attend...

If you aren't able to make it to the event for whatever reason but you still want to contribute to the cause and raise money for charity then have no fear! Nick has set up a brilliant donations page that can be found over here through this link where you can donate whatever you can spare and leave some kind words. 

I can't emphasise enough the work this charity does, I am in direct contact with some research groups funded by the CCLG and they are really pushing the boundaries of science to improve our understanding of cancerous conditions which WILL eventually translate into better medicine for children and most likely adults as well. 

Anyway, that's all from me folks today, be sure to have a read of Nick's blog anyway, though I will do a proper review of his corner of the blogosphere in the coming month, but why wait!!? I will be posting about this event a few more times as it comes closer both to remind people but also to go over my lists that I will be taking as and when I start to design them :)

Peace out,

Rob